Less than three weeks after President Donald Trump pulled the United States from the 195-nation Paris Agreement on climate change, there's a new ragtag group of underdogs supporting carbon-cutting.

ExxonMobil Corp., Total SA, Raymond Dalio, Laurene Powell Jobs, Stephen Hawking, Ratan Tata, and Michael Bloomberg, the founder and owner of Bloomberg LP, among others, have signed on as "founding members" of a months-old group called the Climate Leadership Council. The organization is the brainchild of Ted Halstead, a serial think-tank entrepreneur, who set out to craft traditionally conservative ideas into a potential climate fix.

The Council has developed a draft policy that taxes climate pollution and redirects the money to taxpayers. The idea was first unveiled in February, when former Treasury secretaries James Baker and George Shultz presented it to the president's top economic adviser, Gary Cohn.

"When major fossil fuel producers are supporting a tax that will bear on fossil fuels," said former Treasury Secretary [and CLC member] Lawrence Summers, "it's hard to believe that it isn't a good idea."